Terror's Mouthpiece

Donald Rumsfeld wants Dorrance Smith to be confirmed as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs -- but there's a hitch. Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) has latched on to an op-ed about reporting in an age of terrorism that Mr. Smith wrote for this newspaper on April 25 and pronounced him unfit for the Pentagon job. Mr. Smith's alleged sin? To summarize Sen. Levin's complaints at an Oct. 25 grilling of the nominee: "Unfair labeling."

You decide. In the course of his op-ed (which you can read on our Web site, OpinionJournal.com), Mr. Smith criticized the U.S. media's habit of routinely broadcasting terrorist statements and tapes obtained from the Arab-language broadcaster al-Jazeera and raised questions that many Americans have asked themselves: By airing such footage -- of insurgents in Iraq holding hostages or attacking U.S. soldiers and of al Qaeda officials promising death and destruction -- do TV networks effectively (if unwittingly) enter into a propaganda partnership with terrorists?

Does the terrorists' knowledge that their grisly filmed messages will instantly reach millions embolden them to create more chaos and endanger more lives? Do U.S. networks -- Mr. Smith mentioned six by name, including CNN and Fox -- that air these tapes know, or even inquire about, the terms under which al-Jazeera obtained them?

Is it news each time an al Qaeda leader makes a video, promising death to infidels and offering paradise to suicide bombers? No more so than when Cold War-era Soviet agitprop went on about the glorious Red Army poised to crush the warmongering NATO -- which is why routine Soviet propaganda was largely ignored by the mainstream U.S. media. There is an argument to be made that allowing the terrorists (and before them, the communists) to explain their murderous ambitions to an American audience forces us to take their threats seriously.

Mr. Smith has standing to address these issues in part because the former ABC news producer spent nine months in Iraq as a media adviser to Ambassador Paul Bremer. He knows more about terrorist propaganda, and its potential effects, than the Americans on the receiving end of the terror tapes.

In any case, surely these are all questions the spokesman for U.S. Secretary of Defense has a right -- even a responsibility -- to raise. Contrary to Sen. Levin's assertions, Mr. Smith's op-ed is evidence of why he is qualified for the job -- which, by the way, has been vacant since June 2003 thanks to Sen. Levin's hold on the previous nominee, Lawrence Di Rita.

As for al-Jazeera, something may yet save us from ourselves. Next year, the Qatar-based network plans to launch an English-language service, al-Jazeera International. The new service -- which has already hired the BBC's David Frost and other blinkered Western job-seekers -- says that it intends to compete with CNN on every level.

While pursuing that goal, al-Jazeera is bound to discover that access to terror tapes is one of its few competitive assets in the international arena. This should make the company less eager to give or sell copies to other outlets. You don't need the insight of a Dorrance Smith to see the grim irony of a situation in which the same ruthless market forces that put al Qaeda propaganda on the U.S. airways could one day yank it off.